Bluray owners- Which connection to get best sound?

I use a HDMI cable for both my PS3 and my HD-DVD player. Before I bought my Anthem AVM 50 I had to use the analog inputs on my AVM 20. You dont need HDMI 1.3 (1.1 will work) to get the new sound formats, the player decodes the sound and then sends it out to the processor or receiver in PCM. At this point, there isnt a processor or receiver that will decode the new sound formats. ONLY the player is capable of doing it. If you use the standard Toslink or Dig Coax cable you WILL NOT be able to receive the full bit rate the new sound formats (Dolby TruHD, 5.1 PCM, or DTS-MA)are capable of.

Bottom line, if you want full resolution, use either HDMI or you analog(multichannel)connections.

Chris,

Thanks, but I would never buy a preamp with DAC's in it. To be honest, I rarely (once every couple months) even turn on the receiver, or run through my preamp. I'm not worried about perfect audio calibration. I rarely watch movies on a disc, and when I do, 90% of the time I just run it through the HDMI and listen to the audio through my TV.
I'm not a big HT buff. The video of the Blu-ray is nice, and I do use Netflix, but only two movies a month. Believe it or not, I have trouble squeezing that much movie watching into my schedule.

John

(For DVD not Blu-Ray player) I found that using the analog out from the player into the reciever, and using the reciever for volume control only gave me the best sound for my 5.1 system. For some reason using digital out from the player and having the reciever do the processing sounded harsh and edgy.

Greetings,
I use the 5.1 analog out connections to get the uncompressed audio. This sound is considerably better than audio via the digital connection. I don't have the hdmi connection for uncompressed audio so i can't tell you anything there. The only problem i see with the sony player(not sure if the pioneer is the same) and the analog out is, i can't change speaker distance in player and have to use the processor to control that.

I use the coax digital out from the Pioneer BDP-HD1 with my Valhalla digital cable. This feeds my Theta Casablanca. The sound is awesome. I wish some of the new blue ray players had a digital balanced out .